C/D -- Charlie Kaufman

^well, what happened with this?

New TV pilot:

http://www.deadline.com/2014/01/john-hawkes-michael-cera-to-star-in-charlie-kaufmans-fx-comedy-pilot/

Okay, yeah, I'm at least 92% on board with that.

lol

http://www.clickhole.com/article/cinephiles-rejoice-here-are-9-screenshots-movie-ad-3714

maybe more appropriate for a spike jonze thread though

Anyone read his novel?

“ B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, neurotic and underappreciated film critic (failed academic, filmmaker, paramour, shoe salesman who sleeps in a sock drawer)”

Pass.

No but it is being aggressively advertised to me on various platforms

Is there any talk around here about his new movie on Netflix?

I’m only about 2/3 through and had to take a break. But holy shit. It’s kind of incredible.

curious even though i hated anomalisa

same on both counts

Anyone read his novel?

I did. It’s ridiculous and annoying and brilliant and beautiful. I missed it when it was done.

I really disliked Anomalisa too fwiw.

This kinda became a different thing in the last 1/3 or so and I’m not sure how a feel about the turn, but the first chunk of this is pretty incredible. Don’t think I’ve felt or thought this many things simultaneously moment to moment in a film. Really masterful.

Total sucker for Kaufman and can't wait to see this. Somebody start a I'm Thinking of Ending Things thread!

Watched last night. I was pretty stoned, which helped, I think, but I'm not sure I was convinced by what he does at the end.

Yep, same. But I already want to watch this again, and that says something considering how bleak and uncomfortable it is.

Really loved it

Found this completely insufferable. Think the Variety review is if anything not harsh enough https://variety.com/2020/film/reviews/im-thinking-of-ending-things-review-charlie-kaufman-jessie-buckley-jesse-plemons-1234748508/

That’s an incredibly facile and surface read of the movie. Like there are so many other things happening beneath the surface that aren’t acknowledged at all.

“a bad-news “Twilight Zone” episode that isn’t telling difficult truths; it’s just a Debbie Downer dud”

c’mon

“In the sheep pen, a couple of lambs have died and are frozen solid, which inspires Jake to tell a lovely story about pigs who got eaten alive by maggots. I think it’s supposed to be a metaphor. (Life is like a pig eaten by maggots — you never know what you’re gonna get!)”

I’m interested to read some actual thoughtful swipes at this, but that Gleiberman review is terrible.

Real dunce shit

Like if you see this as a “bummer town sad sack movie about the impossibility of romantic relationships... and then it gets SURREAL” were you watching this shit over the top of your phone? There is a world of things about communication and relating, internal lives against external, hidden histories, shame and reckoning with the past, this play with the audience over sympathies and feelings about characters, the humiliation and horror of aging, the drifting away and changes of loved ones aging, relating to the world and creating yourself through the ideas of others, peace and solace found in fantasy. To say nothing of the fact that this couple might be some fusion of a grander self or maybe some fragment of the janitor’s psyche or whatever.

Just a ton of shit to chew on that that stupid review doesn’t even care to acknowledge. It’s hardly subtext for Christ’s sake.

Also, it’s legitimately laugh out loud funny at points.

Sounds like he wants CK minus the cynicism and navel-gazery which leaves...

He thought Anomalisa was great though. Easily the worst thing he’s done and knocked my appreciation for him down a few notches. This was a solid correction.

that review completely missed what was completely obvious to me, which is that everything that is depicted is the delusions and confused memory of a man with dementia. which is what I actually had an issue with, because it's basically St. Elsewhere meets Twin Peaks, the Return. . Anyway, despite some of my reservations, I did think it was compelling. I want to know who wrote the poem she recited; and also, is that a Pauline Kael essay about Woman Under the Influence?

Yeah it’s a Kael recital and impression. Solid framing in the Childhood Room shot, because the only two books that I really clocked were Kael’s and David Foster Wallace’s. Which obviously come up later. Also a DVD copy of They Live.

the poem is from the book she picks up in the bedroom - "Rotten Perfect Mouth" by Eva H.D.

thanks! yeah I couldn't see the title or the author on that but I wasn't looking very closely

The Wallace book also has the essay on David Lynch and the making of Lost Highway, from a script describing it as a "psychogenic fugue"...

I WISH I wrote this letterboxd review:

basically an amalgamation of everything kaufman sucks at. he spends the entire film briefly presenting these new philosophical ideas through his tedious dialogue yet never expands on these ideas. one minute he’s talking about existentialism and time, then about female liberation and feminism, then about unreciprocated love/relationships, then about death and aging, then about how desires and fantasies of the impossible (think of simping) can affect you. i’m well aware he tends to try juggling a lot of ideas with subtext and metaphors, but it doesn’t even feel like he tried making something meaningful from this. everything even slightly interesting is put on the backburner for an “epic charlie kaufman mindfuck moment” and pretty much ditches these ideas after it’s given some meaningless monologue voiceover about it. in the last 15-20 minutes or so there’s an abrupt tonal change, but its subtext was the closest kaufman got to elaborate on one of the aforementioned ideas, yet instead there’s just a plot twist that explains why/how everything in the course of the movie happened, and it just doesn’t work for me. i understand the film is supposed to be vague but it isnt concise at all, just messy and shallow. which is why by the end, how everything untangles and plays off doesn’t leave you with a strong feeling about anything, but more of a mild reaction about everything kaufman couldn’t make his mind up on.

https://letterboxd.com/childofbucky/film/im-thinking-of-ending-things/

a couple things I noticed: Kaufman obviously cast Plemmons as an ersatz PSH, and there's a clear visual allusion to Eternal Sunshine at the end (overhead shot of the car in the snowy parking lot)

Antkind was astonishingly awful and this movie was fine, but he already covered all of this material and territory in Synecdoche. he reached the apex of everything he had been working towards to that point, and in the 12 years since he's had nothing new to say. I don't think the impact of Synecdoche can be understated, I still think it's one of the most formally unique films I've ever seen and a movie that really did advance the medium. So my expectations were very high for the book, they cut down to almost nothing, and now this movie is more treading water, not as bad as the book, but with just a few funny sections and nothing moving. SNY is extremely funny too

I've only ever seen the "time avalanche" structure of Synecdoche (50 years in 2 hours, unevenly dispersed) used in one other movie, The Long Gray Line. It really works!

Flappy, I agree with everything you say about Synecdoche, so I'm kind of surprised you hated Antkind that much. It certainly required several mental readjustments, and comedy that dark is always tricky, but I was blown away by it!

Wasn't dark enough. Synecdoche was much funnier. Antkind was insufferable because of the tics of the character. You're essentially put through 700 pages of a Kaufman character's inner monologue, and it is predictably torture. I thought it was a pale imitation of Sabbath's Theater and to think the same guy made Synecdoche makes me very depressed.

Kael still otm about A Woman Under the Influence.

She is. I like it but my biggest problem with that movie though is that Gena Rowlands disappears for the second half, and like all Cassavetes movies, it's too fucking long!

first hour of this is banging. second hour steadily lost me then caught me then lost me again, a little too much absorption of other texts into the text, the poem went a long way but the kael recitation felt very tedious while it was happening, and then the "baby it's cold outside" argument, my god lol. of course i get it. we are in many ways just traces of other people, our ideas just cobbled together from ideas we've absorbed from others and bent through our perspective. but i guess i was disappointed to figure out that the main character is a trace, a compilation of multiple people, very similar to though not as my profound as my disappointment that anomalisa was just about how shitty this one fuckin guy is. i still kinda liked it. kaufman deconstructs experience to the point where it's like we're viewing a life from the inside out. it's never not formally exciting. it's just if the ideas aren't working all the time i slip right out of whatever effect it's trying to have. anyway, always worth it to see toni collette work

circa's posts make me like it more, and i certainly lol'd v hard at the robert zemeckis credits roll in the middle

not gonna spoiler tag this bc i think it's very apparent early on, but i loved the motif of the various names she's called during the movie literally calling her phone. so stressful

i liked this quite a lot (much more than synecdoche), second circas thoughts.

everything is tinged.

the balance of everything seemed right to me, the audience is certainly not spoonfed & has to puzzle out how to contextualize everything similarly to how the main character is tracking where/how things went wrong in his life

i think its exceedingly clever even just the framing conceit of drawing in a diff type of audience w/ "im thinking of ending things" as a break-up movie

how do you do that hidden text thing?

I found most of the film irritating and hamhanded.

jed, click the "show formatting help" link under the submit post button

Alfred knows

No. Both of you are wrong.

My hot take. Irritating, yes. Consciously so. I think everything up until when they leave the house is easily the best thing he’s ever done. So clearly.

I’m not even a big Kaufman fan, but there’s so much to chew on moment to moment. And it’s a masterful tightrope walk. Lot of people shitting on this don’t seem to care to actually reckon with it. How is this “ham handed”? Somehow inscrutable yet obvious.